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Disabled couple seek life together in group home

Published on NewsOK
Modified: May 7, 2013 at 5:47 pm •
Published: May 7, 2013

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PORT JEFFERSON, N.Y. (AP) — With the beaming smiles of newlyweds, Paul Forziano and Hava Samuels hold hands, exchange adoring glances and complete each other's sentences. Their first wedding dance, he recalls, was to the song "Unchained ..." ''Melody," she chimes in.

Hava Samuels, third from left, and her husband Paul Farziano, third from right, sit with their parents Norman Samuels, far left and Bonnie Samuels, second from left, and Frank Farziano, far right, and Rosann Farziano, second from right, during an interview on Thursday, April 25, 2013 in Port Jefferson, N.Y. Paul and Have, a developmentally disabled couple, has brought a lawsuit against the group facilities where they live for violating the Disability Act, by refusing them residence as a married couple. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)

They spend their days together in the performing arts education center where they met. But every night, they must part ways. Forziano goes to his group home. His wife goes to hers.

The mentally disabled couple is not allowed to share a bedroom by the state-sanctioned nonprofits that run the group homes — a practice the newlyweds and their parents are now challenging in a federal civil rights lawsuit.

"We're very sad when we leave each other," Forziano says. "I want to live with my wife, because I love her."

The couple had been considering marriage for three years before tying the knot last month, and they contend in their lawsuit that they were refused permission from their respective group homes to live together as husband and wife. The couple's parents, also plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said they have been seeking a solution since 2010.

"It's not something we wanted to do, it's something we had to do," said Bonnie Samuels, the mother of the bride.

The lawsuit contends Forziano's facility refused because people requiring the services of a group home are by definition incapable of living as married people, and it says Samuels' home refused because it believes she doesn't have the mental capacity to consent to sex.

Legal experts are watching the case closely as a test of the Americans With Disabilities Act, which says, in part, that "a public entity shall make reasonable modifications in policies, practices, or procedures ... to avoid discrimination on the basis of disability." The group homes are licensed as nonprofits by the state and receive Medicaid funding on behalf of their clients.

"This is a case that is moving into uncharted territory," says George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley. "If a state licenses the couple to be married, they are afforded all of the protections and privileges of marriage. The most fundamental right is to be able to live together as a married couple."

The couple's attorney, Martin Coleman, says he has not come across any similar court cases. "What the group homes are saying is that for this class of people, you shouldn't be married. ... What point of intellectual disability is too low for someone to be married?"

Sara Gelser, an Oregon state legislator and member of the National Council on Disability board of directors, says Americans have increasingly come to recognize the rights of the disabled to choose to live their own lives, and marriage and sex is part of that.

She says the couple's sex life is nobody's business.

"No one has a right to tell an adult what they can do," Gelser says. "Sex is a healthy and full part of the human experience. I know it makes some people uncomfortable to think people with intellectual disabilities are engaging in sexual relations, but I don't understand that."

A spokeswoman for the Catholic Health Systems, which runs the Maryhaven Center of Hope, has declined to comment, citing pending litigation. Maryhaven has 2,000 clients, ranging in age from 5 to 80, in facilities across Long Island. The facility in Manorville where Samuels lives is for women only.